The Relationship between Financial and Job Satisfaction and Levels of Happiness Among Different Social Classes
Carrie Magee, Abhimanyu Barun, Ambar Pathak, and Kismat Khatri
Introduction
There is still contention over whether money and success are the key to real happiness. Americans are often forced to sacrifice their happiness due to a culture that puts immense focus on establishing a successful career and working towards financial freedom. Furthermore, studies have shown the potential effects social class has on individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Manstead, 2018). In relation, individuals of different social classes may have varying life experiences that can influence their financial and job satisfaction as well as their general happiness.
With the use of data from the General Social Survey, our report focuses on the general happiness of a individual in relation to their work satisfaction and financial satisfaction from 1972 to 2021 using a total of 47,251 observations. In order to measure job satisfaction, we used the statement “On the whole, how satisfied are you with the work you do..?” with responses ranging from “very satisfied, moderately satisfied, a little dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied”. Similarly, financial satisfaction was measured using the question “So far as you and your family are concerned, would you say that you are pretty well satisfied with your present financial situation, more or less satisfied, or not satisfied at all?” Our third variable “general happiness” was measured by asking “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days–would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”
More specifically, we hoped to uncover any potential relationships between an individuals’ social class and their job satisfaction, financial satisfaction, and general happiness. Social class was measured by asking “If you were asked to use one of four names for your social class, which would you say you belong in?” with four responses including “the lower class, the working class, the middle class, or the upper class”.
Descriptive Statistics
The first pie chart shows that more than half of the people are pretty happy (57%) whereas the individuals who report being very happy and not too happy make up 31% and 12% of the sample respectively.
The second pie chart shows the makeup by different social classes for the sample. It shows that nearly half of the people fall under the working class (49.1%) and about 43% of the sample consider themselves to be middle class. Lower class individuals make up about 5% of the sample while upper class individuals make up about 3% of the sample.
The third pie chart shows that nearly half of the people are more or less satisfied with their financial situation (~46%) whereas about 27% of people are pretty well satisfied and 27% are not satisfied at all with their financial situation.
The last pie chart shows about 48% of the sample are very satisfied with their job whereas 4.1% of people are dissatisfied with their job. The percentage of people who are a little dissatisfied and moderately satisfied are 10% and 38.2% respectively.
Chi Squared Analysis
| Happiness Level |
Financial Satisfaction |
Total | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
More or less satisfied |
Not satisfied at all |
Pretty well satisfied |
||
| Not too happy |
1964 33.5 % |
3200 54.5 % |
704 12 % |
5868 100 % |
| Pretty happy |
13142 48.7 % |
7607 28.2 % |
6210 23 % |
26959 100 % |
| Very happy |
6321 43.8 % |
2063 14.3 % |
6040 41.9 % |
14424 100 % |
| Total |
21427 45.3 % |
12870 27.2 % |
12954 27.4 % |
47251 100 % |
χ2=4556.829 · df=4 · Cramer’s V=0.220 · p=0.000 |
The cross tabulation above shows the frequency of happiness levels by financial satisfaction. We wanted to further examine the relationship between financial satisfaction and happiness in order to see how feelings of financial satisfaction can potentially influence how happy an individual feels in life. According to the chi-squared test of independence, there is a significant relationship between happiness and financial satisfaction (p<0.05). This means that an individual’s level of happiness depends on their feelings of satisfaction with their current financial situation. More specifically, the table shows that a majority of individuals (54.5%) that report being not at all satisfied with their financial situation were not too happy in life. In addition, almost 49% of people that reported being more or less satisfied with their financial situation were pretty happy with their life while about 42% of individuals that were pretty well satisfied with their financial situation reported being very happy in life. The results clearly imply that the more financially satisfied an individual is, the happier they are in life.
| Happiness Level | Job Satisfaction | Total | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
A little dissatisfied |
Moderately satisfied | Very dissatisfied | Very satisfied | ||
| Not too happy |
1163 19.8 % |
2270 38.7 % |
716 12.2 % |
1719 29.3 % |
5868 100 % |
| Pretty happy |
2897 10.7 % |
11812 43.8 % |
968 3.6 % |
11282 41.8 % |
26959 100 % |
| Very happy |
660 4.6 % |
3986 27.6 % |
269 1.9 % |
9509 65.9 % |
14424 100 % |
| Total |
4720 10 % |
18068 38.2 % |
1953 4.1 % |
22510 47.6 % |
47251 100 % |
χ2=4389.595 · df=6 · Cramer’s V=0.216 · p=0.000 |
The cross tabulation above shows the frequency of happiness levels by job satisfaction. We wanted to further examine the relationship between job satisfaction and happiness in order to see how job satisfaction can potentially influence how happy an individual feels in life. According to the chi-squared test of independence, there is a significant relationship between job satisfaction and happiness (p<0.05). This means that an individual’s level of happiness depends on their satisfaction with their current job. The table shows that a majority of individuals that reported being very dissatisfied (12.2%) or a little dissatisfied (19.8%) with their jobs were not too happy in their lives. About 44% of people that were moderately satisfied with their jobs reported being pretty happy in life while 65.9% of people who were very satisfied with their jobs reported being very happy in life. Considering that individuals who reported being more dissatisfied with job also reported being unhappy and those who reported being more satisfied were more happy shows that job satisfaction may play a crucial role in how happy individuals are in life.
Graphical Representation of the Data
Financial Satisfaction and Happiness by Social Class
This figure illustrates the relationship between individuals’ financial satisfaction and general happiness by social class. For context, there is also a disproportionate number of individuals in the middle and working class groups in comparison to the lower and upper class individuals. For lower, working, and middle class groups, a majority of individuals were more or less satisfied with their financial situation and reported feeling pretty happy in their life. It is important to note that there is a similar trend in the middle class group for both job satisfaction and financial satisfaction in relation to happiness. Middle class individuals that are highly satisfied with their job or financial situation were equally high in both the pretty happy and very happy responses.For upper class individuals, a large number were pretty well satisfied with their financial situation and reported being very happy in life. As we can see, the results show that the higher the social class the more you become satisfied with your financial situation and the more you report being very happy while the more you go down in class, the more your satisfaction and happiness become average (as in more or less satisfied and pretty happy).
Job Satisfaction and Happiness by Social Class
The figure above looks at the relationship between individuals’ job satisfaction and general happiness by social class. For context, there is a larger number of working and middle class individuals than upper and lower class individuals. The results show that many lower class individuals were very satisfied with their job and that those same individuals were pretty happy overall. A majority of working class individuals were also very satisfied with their job and were also pretty happy. Interestingly, many middle class individuals were very satisfied with their jobs and reported being equally pretty happy and very happy in their lives. The upper class individuals were the only group that had more very happy individuals with very high job satisfaction. In other words, most individuals within the four social class groups were very satisfied with their jobs but only upper class individuals had more very happy individuals compared to pretty happy individuals. These results provide some insight into how social class may have a greater influence on individual’s feelings of financial satisfaction and thus also influencing their feelings of happiness in life.
Time-Series Analysis
Happiness and Job Satisfaction Over Time
We created one subset of the dataframe by adding a column of percentage value of every possible combination of happiness, year, and job satisfaction. Similarly, we created another subset that showed the percentage value of every possible combination of happiness, year, and financial satisfaction.
The graph tells us a story of how job satisfaction relates to the level of happiness, over time, of the surveyed individuals, with time being on the x-axis, the percentage of happiness on the y-axis (with its subcategory description in the legends that are right aligned), and the job satisfaction in a matrix of panels where each panel represents one subcategory of job satisfaction. It is visible that a little amount of discomfort is imminent in human lives, which is exactly what the data tells us when we see that there is a small group of people who are a little dissatisfied with their job and they seem to have a moderate happiness level too. This moderate happiness value hits its peak in 1980, 1984, 1987, and 1993 but never crosses the 10 percent happiness mark.
When it comes to being moderately satisfied by the job, we can see that this is directly proportional to being pretty or moderately happy in life. We see the pretty-happy value fluctuating between 1982 and 1984 after regaining its position in 1985. The moderately happy value maximizes in the year 2000, while the not too happy and very happy values stay close to 10 percent and below for the complete timeline. Another thing that stands out in this part of the graph is how the not-too-happy and very happy values interchange their positioning with the onset of 2020 and go on to stay that way even in 2021 because of two major reasons: 1. crippling inflation; and 2. the COVID-19 pandemic. We additionally went on the internet and managed to get a frame of data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (visually represented by Statista in their YouTube video) for the year 2000. We can say that we see a sudden upward movement from 1998 to 2000 for the percentage value of pretty happy and very happy people, which is exactly where the professional and business services industry took off because of feature-rich computers that had been commercialized, which naturally meant a decline in the not-so-happy percentage in the same time frame. This is important in proving the validity of the data because moderately satisfied people are usually the ones who are earning just enough to not suffer but not enough to call themselves rich. The sectoral shift from the manufacturing-heavy job sector to the professional and business services sector meant more job opportunities for people who were moderately satisfied with their jobs.
It is also evident that the people who are very dissatisfied with their jobs tend to have very low levels of happiness. The percentage value of happiness for people who are very dissatisfied with their jobs never even crosses the 5 percent mark from 1972 to 2021.
For the people who are very satisfied with their jobs, the percentage happiness number is relatively high for moderately happy and/or very happy people. The very happy value crosses the moderately happy value on the graph on 4 occasions: 1974, 1984, 1988, and 1990. It goes on to decrease after 1990 with a major movement post-2018 until 2021 due to the same 2 reasons that have affected everyone across all categories of job satisfaction amongst people, and that is the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation. We see a symmetry in the not-very-happy percentage going up while both the happiness percentage values are coming down amongst the people who were very satisfied with their job. It is because the country came to a stop due to a lockdown to prevent the disease from spreading, which caused the loss of jobs even for people who were very satisfied with it, causing a loss in happiness.
Happiness and Financial Satisfaction Over Time
This plot illustrates the relationship between financial satisfaction and level of happiness over time for the surveyed individuals, with time on the x-axis, percentage happiness on the y-axis (with its subcategory description in the legends that are right aligned), and financial satisfaction in a matrix of panels where each panel represents one subcategory of financial satisfaction. It is visible that when we stack up a big picture metric of financial satisfaction against job satisfaction and we look at people who are more or less satisfied with their financial status, we find that there are a significant percentage of people who are moderately happy and even very happy, which is directly proportional to them being partially satisfied, with the not too happy percentage being on the low side. The pretty-happy values hit major bottoms twice, in 1974 and 2008, and major peaks in 1987, 1991, and 1994, while fluctuating otherwise. After COVID-19 in 2020 and the additively negative effects of inflation, the not-too-happy value suddenly goes up, bringing down the very-happy percentage equally dramatically with it. Also, we see that in this category, the moderately happy percentage value goes up, discarding the general trend from 2018 to 2021 in this category, which can be backed up by the fact that these people are generally in the middle class or small business category, and COVID-19 gave them a huge opportunity to be profitable from their small or local businesses while all the big firms were shut down.
When we move on to people not satisfied at all, we see that the happiness percentage never broke the 20 percent barrier and stays below that even after a gradual rise from 11.95 percent in 1972 and topping three times in 1983, 1993, and 2010, respectively. The very happy number, as expected, stays at the lowest of the lows for people that are not at all financially satisfied, and the not-happy percentage very slowly goes up with the rise in inflation over all these years with a steep upward movement, and this value represents the people already having financial problems, which rose after COVID-19. This is justified by the very happy number going further down along with the moderately happy number going down.
If we move on to the last part of our graph, we find both happiness values higher than the “not too happy” value, which makes sense considering the group we are highlighting right now is pretty well satisfied. We see pretty happy percentage values surpassing very happy values eighteen times from 1975 to 2021, in the following years: 1975, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2016, and 2021. The moderately happy percentage value goes up yet again, discarding the general trend from 2018 to 2021, with very similar reasoning that these numbers are being contributed by people owning small businesses. As the inflation rate went up with time, we saw a slow and steady rise in the unhappiness percentage with a steeper climb from 2018 to 2020, which effectively caused a sharp fall for the very happy value, even for the pretty well satisfied group of people, which can be justified by the combined negative effect of inflation and COVID-19 affecting jobs and businesses alike.
Conclusion
When we look at the combined data for all the years, We can say that 88% of the people are happy, and 12% are not too happy. We see that nearly 50% of the people belong to the working class, and almost 43% belong to the Middle Class. About 2/3rd of the people are satisfied with their financial situation, or we can say that 27.42% are not satisfied with their financial situation. We got a better view from the chi-square analysis when comparing happiness against financial satisfaction. Most people who are very happy (~90%) are satisfied with their job. But we observe that happy people also decrease as the number of unsatisfied people increases. A similar trend was observed for happiness against job satisfaction. We can see that very happy and satisfied people are about 66% of the data. We can see that as dissatisfaction increases, the number of happy decreases. We can also see that the higher in class you go, the more satisfied and happy you are. The lower and working classes differ from the middle and upper classes regarding job satisfaction and happiness. However, the upper class shows this extremely positive trend in happiness and job satisfaction, where most individuals are very happy. In contrast, so class may be a significant influence on the happiness level.
In the time series analysis, over the years, we see that more than 40% of people are happy and satisfied financially. People who are pretty well satisfied financially and not too happy barely makeup 2% of the people.
Overall, happiness is related to job and financial satisfaction. The more financially satisfied you are, the happier you are. In addition, the more satisfied you are with your job, the happier you are.One might believe that money can not buy you happiness, but the data points out that money, along with a fulfilling job and financial freedom, has the potential to provide happiness. Job fulfillment and financial security can make our life easier and more comfortable. It allows us to fulfill our needs and wants. In the future, we can also observe a similar relationship between job and financial satisfaction with the stress levels of individuals. It will be interesting to find connections with other similar variables. In the future, after gathering more data, we can also observe the short-term and long-term impact on individuals due to covid and how long it took for the numbers to return to pre covid time.